And eaten plenty of cake, which they were then consternated to find missing.

We Are Scientists shocked themselves and impressed many others with their 2005 debut With Love & Squalor, which sold over 100,000 copies in the UK on the strength of dancefloor standbys Nobody Move, Nobody Get Hurt; It’s A Hit; and The Great Escape, as well as nine other songs that, to all appearances, people also liked. Twenty months of near-constant touring culminated in a sold out UK tour, including two nights at Brixton Academy, in the Fall of 2006, plus a very pleasant Christmas.

The band spent 2007 at weight-loss camps, alcoholics’ dry-out facilities, and a race car school, yet has also found time to pen, record, and road-test their sophomore offering, Brain Thrust Mastery. If W.A.S.’s first album had been far, far better than it was, and of a far more mature style, and if they had then released a limp, unenjoyable second record, and if Brain Thrust Mastery were actually their third album, it would be hailed as ‘a return to form’, as ‘equal to — in many ways an improvement upon — the monumental debut’.

We Are Scientists began, in spirit, at Pomona College, in Claremont, California, in the Fall of 1997, when Keith Murray and Chris Cain met at a viewing of Dawson’s Creek held in the latter’s dorm room. Though at the time they couldn’t suspect any of the details of the coming decade, it was apparent to both of them that they would spend many long years riding buses together — some kind of sales, they assumed. In 1999, freshly graduated and moved to Berkeley, CA, the two started We Are Scientists with little more between them than a dream, a couple of cut-rate instruments, and $1.4 million in lottery winnings.

Nine years later, the band has long-since relocated to more fashionable New York City, seen many countries their parents swore to them were ‘myth, accursed myth’, and finally dated girls. In the Fall of ‘07, long-time drummer Michael Tapper retired from the band, and We Are Scientists added a new drummer, plus, in a fit of accumulation, a fourth man on-stage. As well, Keith and Chris began giving inspirational lectures at unis across the UK duing their hitherto unencumbered afternoons. On Brain Thrust Mastery, all the experience, and some W.A.S. only read about, shows.